Month: June 2005

Torture via Starvation by Mugabe

by

by Charles

Joe Katzman wrote a lengthy and good piece on Zimbabwe a few days ago.  The dire situation in this once free country was the final tumbler for him, cementing his view that the right to keep and bear arms is a universal human right "on par with freedom of speech and religion".  Welcome to the club, Joe, glad you finally came around.  But what grabbed me more is the fact that, over the past twenty five years, President Robert Mugabe has run this formerly prosperous country down to dust, from Africa’s bread basket to basket case.  The Telegraph:

President Robert Mugabe’s onslaught against Zimbabwe’s cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.

Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike.

The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home".

Shades of Pol Pot and his killing fields.  All that’s lacking are "reeducation" camps.  Today’s New York Times has a similar report.  Mugabe isn’t just sentencing 200,000 of his political opposition to slow death by starvation, he is purposefully gutting his own economy in the process.

Chris Viljoen and his wife, Elsie, were still inside their five-bedroom house when a bulldozer began reducing it to rubble. The white couple live in the industrial zone of the capital, Harare.

Next door was a 70-acre site filled with 24 factories and workshops. Bulldozers spent last week razing this area, destroying all but nine businesses that employed about 1,000 people in a country suffering mass unemployment and economic crisis.

…

Across Zimbabwe, the United Nations estimates that 200,000 people have lost their homes, with the poorest townships bearing the brunt of Mr Mugabe’s onslaught. "The vast majority are homeless in the streets," said Miloon Kothari, the UN’s housing representative. He added that "mass evictions" were creating a "new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated".

Virtually all the areas singled out for demolition voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the last elections. The MDC says that Mr Mugabe ordered the destruction as a deliberate reprisal. But the regime is also seeking to depopulate the cities, driving people into the countryside where the MDC is virtually non-existent and the ruling Zanu-PF Party dominates.

The Herald, the official daily newspaper, urged "urbanites" to go "back to the rural home, to reconnect with one’s roots and earn an honest living from the soil our government repossessed under the land reform programme".

Betsy Newmark:

What Mugabe is doing now in Zimbabwe is reminiscent of Stalin’s actions to induce famine in the Ukraine. Zimbabwe was once one of the more prosperous African countries and now it is in an economic shambles solely due to Mugabe’s treatment of his own people. Now, he is driving people out of the cities and destroying their lone source of earning a living. They are being pushed towards the countryside which is experiencing a drought now. Sadly, we will probably learn in the coming months how these people have starved to death. That is one way for Mugabe to get rid of his opposition.

In effect, Mugabe is sending political opponents to government-owned farms, presumably to be paid at government-set rates, assuming they are employed once they get there in first place.  Southern share croppers had it better.  In addition to driving its citizens off the land they legally own, Mugabe is systematically starving those who don’t toe his line.  Another from the Telegraph:

People are being starved in Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe’s deliberate and systematic ploy of using food shortages to cling to power.

Millions of people are going hungry not, as Mr Mugabe’s government claims, because of poor rains but as a direct result of its policy of denying food to opposition supporters and enriching its loyalists.

Last night, the deadline passed for the mass eviction of 2,900 of Zimbabwe’s white commercial farmers, for decades the mainstay of the agricultural sector. Mr Mugabe ordered them to abandon their homes, land and livelihoods by midnight.

An investigation by The Telegraph found that control of the Grain Marketing Board (GMB), Zimbabwe’s state-owned monopoly supplier of commercial maize, was passed this year to one of Mr Mugabe’s most loyal henchmen, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, an alleged war criminal.

With Zimbabwe’s economy in chaos, Shiri’s mission was to spend a £17 million loan provided by Libya buying just enough maize to stave off food riots, which would then be supplied through the GMB.

The organisation, which is meant to supply maize at subsidised prices to all Zimbabweans, has instead been selling maize only to supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party. Backers of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change went hungry.

Worse still was the country’s Food For Work programme. Thousands of opposition supporters would provide 15 days’ labour only to be told at the end there was no GMB food for them.

The GMB is so corrupt and politicised that aid groups shipping food into Zimbabwe are being forced to set up their own expensive parallel storage and distribution facilities, rather than using those of the GMB – the traditional way of bringing food aid into Zimbabwe.

There is also evidence that the Zimbabwean government is deliberately blocking the work of these international aid groups and keeping the flow of aid down to a trickle.

That trickle is enough to stave off threats of public unrest, but not enough to provide food for all of the country.

"What we are seeing is nothing but humanitarian torture," an aid worker said. "It takes three months to die of starvation and this is a torture every bit as bad as beating someone with barbed wire or hanging them from handcuffs.

Emphasis mine.  Joe Katzman:

Um, ever studied what dying of starvation actually involves, dude? It’s just a little bit worse than hanging from handcuffs – and there’s nothing humanitarian about it.

What do the various humanitarian groups have to say?

  • Freedom House:  Zimbabwe garners sixes (with seven being least free) in civil liberties and political rights.  Their report confirms that democracy there is a joke, on par with Iran’s "democracy".
  • Index of Economic Freedom:  Ranked 151st in economic freedom.  Only Libya, Burma and North Korea have economies that are less free.  Even communist Cuba ranks better than Mugabeland.
  • Reporters Without Borders:  Ranked 155th in press freedom, tied with Syria.  Its 2005 annual report on the nation once known as Rhodesia quite simply states:  "Freedom of the press simply does not exist in Zimbabwe. Everything is under government control, from the licensing of the media and journalists down to the content of articles. Television and radio are a state monopoly. Police and the judiciary ensure that dissenters live in terror or endure the constant battering of a relentless harassment."
  • Amnesty International:  "The government continued its campaign of repression aimed at eliminating political opposition and silencing dissent."  There is not one category that Zimbabwe is not egregiously violating.  How does AI rank Zimbabwe relative to the 148 other countries it covers?  Oh yeah, it doesn’t.
  • Human Rights Watch:  "The human rights situation in Zimbabwe continues to be of grave concern."  Four articles written on Zimbabwe this year, with more interest focused on their sham March election than the democide that Mugabe is currently overseeing.
  • Transparency International:  Ranked 114th in corruption out of 146 countries, tied with Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Congo and Ethiopia.

Austin Bay has a piece here, and he hearkens back to an observation he made in 2002 that rings just as true today:

Here’s the lede:

He’s an ethnic cleanser, a “former Marxist” and a cynical thief whose greed and mismanagement has destroyed a once productive economy.

His scheme to retain power involves the dictator’s usual routines: stoking ethnic strife, inciting economic envy, silencing the press, physically intimidating his domestic opposition.

Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic? No, Slobo’s been nabbed and is on trial in the Hague. This time the scoundrel is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The local context is a March 2002 national election in Zimbabwe, where once again Mugabe’s election platform includes the murder of his democratic opponents in the black-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe is never held accountable for his oppression and destruction.

The difference between Mugabe and Miloslevic is that Mugabe is engaging in political cleansing, not ethnic cleansing.  What exactly is the food situation under Mugabe’s fascist regime?  Horrible.  The Washington Post:

Zimbabwe, facing fears of widespread famine, has welcomed the resumption of international food donations that could feed up to 4 million people, U.N. officials reported Wednesday. President Robert Mugabe had curtailed such aid last year, saying the country could feed itself.

The problem is that Mugabe will use these food donations as a weapon, strengthening his political allies and starving his opposition.  Chester asks the relevant question:  Is Zimbabwe the Kitty Genovese of the international community?  Unless we do not spotlight what’s going on there, the answer is yes.

So what are we to do?  When South African president Thabo Mbeki met with President Bush, Mbeki offered nothing but platitudes and Bush was little better.  Mbeki couldn’t even admit that a genocide was occurring in Sudan.  Tony Blair is pushing for more aid to Africa from the US, but whatever portion gets to Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s opponents will still starve and unless there are important strings attached, it will be a counterproductive effort [Ed. sentence revised].  Here are my thoughts:

  • Provide moral support for an "African solution" as Mbeki suggested but expect that there will no beneficial results.  Mbeki hasn’t lifted a finger against Mugabe, and the South African’s "African Renaissance" has the heft of those puffy rice crackers.
  • Give food, money and arms to the opposition party, the MDC, as Perry de Havilland suggests.  They deserve the right to defend themselves and seek freedom, and they could take comfort in these words:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  • I don’t know if the UN has sanctioned Zimbabwe, but it they haven’t, they should.  If they have, then sanction them more.  By the way, Zimbabwe is a current member of the UN Human Rights Commission.  When will Kofi Annan kick this country off?  [See Update below]
  • Provide aid directly to those that Mugabe is purposely starving, using military forces if necessary to secure distribution.
  • Start a blogging storm.  Nothing will get done and nothing will change until we clamor for it.  Let’s get going.

Update:  I stand corrected on the portion struck out above.  To amend the sentence:  When will Kofi Annan take steps toward kicking this country off?  Does Annan have the direct authority to remove Zimbabwe?  No.  Members are voted in by other continent-sharing countries.  Getting a spot on the HR commission has proven an effective way to shield the offending countries from official UN criticism.  Saudi Arabia and Cuba have done well at that.  A leader would call a country on such cynical ploys and make proposals, not wait for a commission’s word.  Has Annan proposed scrapping the existing HR commission in favor of a new, reformulated one?  Yes, and to his credit if it happens.  Has Annan lobbied the existing HR commission to remove those countries engaging in genocide and democide?  To my knowledge, no.  The primary issue with Kofi Annan is his abysmal failure of leadership, which will likely be the topic of a separate post.  Finally, taking the UN and its top leader to task does not mean that individual nations bear no responsibility.  The United States should lead the way on sanctioning Zimbabwe.

(cross posted at Redstate.org)

Read more

The Potential for Abuse with Evangelical Ministry

by

I grew up in one of the nation’s most ambitious evangelical churches, and I spent years hearing the message: anyone who is not one of us will surely burn in hell. That certainty fits in quite nicely with the church’s ambitions. More converts equals more souls in heaven. And, let’s be frank, it also means more money.

Whether the ultimate motivation to proselytize (we called it "witnessing") is money or souls depends on the individual, but the culture of the church is such that one is encouraged to witness tirelessly. My church stops short of knocking on doors regularly, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they also had no sincere respect for the non-born-agains’ desire to be left alone. Oh, they’d take a hint and back away if someone in their daily lives told them to drop it, but they were convinced (and I mean, that…totally and unshakably convinced) that your being born again was imperative to saving your mortal soul, and so they would never totally give up. I don’t know how conscious it was (in fact, it’s really unfair of me not to strongly suggest it’s not), but any tragedy in the un-born-again’s life could be seized upon as an opportunity to help them see how being born again was a blessing.

The thing is that they were earnest in believing they had to keep after you until you too were born again. All of which is fine (I guess) so long as you have the right to tell them to shove off. When that urge to save your soul becomes dangerous though is when the person proselytizing has authority over those who are not believers. Combined with zealousness, that situation often leads to religious intolerance. Consider what’s been happening at the Air Force Academy:

Read more

Karnak Lifetime Achievement Award

by

It has to go to none other than Karnak himself.  Regretfully, it’s also posthumous.  My favorite: (closed envelope is brought to the forehead) "A triple and a double, catcher’s and fielder’s, and Dolly Parton" (rips open the envelope) "Name two big hits, two big mitts…..and a famous country singer!" It’s Friday, nigh on cocktail hour, … Read more

Uncomfortably Numb

by

I remember when a headline like this made me angry and sad…now it just makes me numb: Roadside Bomb Kills Five Marines in Iraq I used to feel tears swell up in my eyes while I read the list of soldiers killed every Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"; now I scan the names … Read more

By Request: Introducing Darleen Druyun

by

Disclaimer: I work for Boeing’s business competition.  Nothing in this post is intended to be a blanket condemnation of Boeing, but it does (and has) condemned some of Boeing’s corporate leadership.  I don’t maintain, either, that this could never happen here.  Also, this is less about Boeing as a company than it is about an … Read more

Amnesty Part IV

by

Sorry for the month-long hiatus.  It was necessary.  In the meantime my volleyball team won 3rd out of 43 in Dallas over the Memorial Day weekend.  While the Amnesty International discussions below have not been very fruitful, and I’m loathe to reopen them, a perfect example of what I have previously argued as their lack … Read more

The Kidnapped Brides of Kyrgyzstan

by

It seems totally barbaric to me, and the Front Line piece on it has moments that are incredibly difficult to watch (including the story of one young woman who either hanged herself or was murdered by her "husband’s" family), but the practice of kidnapping brides in Kyrgyzstan is a very complex cultural institution that stunningly often ends in very happy marriages.

I’ve asked "Bambino" (aka my partner) about it, and his response is similar to that of many of the Kyrgyz people interviewed in the Front Line segment: a knowing smile, a blush, and a heartfelt insistence that to most Kyrgyz people it’s not as bad as it must appear to outsiders. It’s simply "cultural."

There are no ready facts on how long ago the practice started, but given that the traditional method was to capture one’s bride while riding a horse, the mastery of which became a cultural staple after Genghis Khan invaded this part of the world, it stands to reason the Mongolian invaders introduced this tradition via their conquests. I don’t want to speculate too much about the psychology of it, but there is a bit of nationalistic pride in the voices of those who explain it, even the women.

Bambino explains that he sees it more or less as an elopement. Often a young couple discuss and plan a kidnapping as a means of cutting through the woman’s family’s disapproval of her choice. In fact, Bambino’s mother arranged to be kidnapped by his father for this very reason.

Other times, however, a shy young man decides to kidnap a woman he doesn’t actually know and is too busy working on the farm or simply too self-conscious to get to know. The number of these women who eventually concede (or are simply worn down by the nagging of the "groom’s" family and give in) to marry is amazing to me. Even more amazing though, as the Front Line segment shows, is how many of them months and years later seem really, truly happy in their marriages, suggesting that the "resistance" they put up while being coerced into the marriage is a bit of cultural theater as well. Perhaps, if one is expecting to be kidnapped, it’s rather exciting to be coy, I don’t know. It’s totally foreign to me.

The practice was outlawed during the days of the Soviet Union, but it still happened frequently (as Bambino’s mother can attest). It was again outlawed by the Kyrgyz government in 1994, but, again, that’s had very little impact.

Now, rather than use horses, a young man and his friends will use a car to kidnap the woman he’s interested in. If the young man doesn’t have a car, they hire a taxi for the day. All this assistance in the illegal act seems to be openly, even proudly, discussed. Once a woman (or girl, as if sometimes the case) is taken to the "groom’s" parents’ home, the "bride’s" family is contacted and told of the kidnapping. If the woman’s family strongly objects or if the woman simply will not concede, she will be set free, but there’s a cultural price to be paid for such disobedience, as the "groom’s" family curses the woman and spreads lies about her.

Something about the whole thing seems oddly back-country Irish to me. My ex grew up on a farm in County Clare and described similarly sheepish attitudes toward simply asking women to date among many Irish men (an extraordinary number of men from that area never marry).* In fact, there are other parallels between Kyrgyz and Irish culture that I’m recognizing, but I’ll save those for another post. I mention it now simply to suggest that although kidnapping seems barbaric to me, given how many of those marriages turn into very happy stories, it’s far less tragic than the loneliness the Irish culture breeds.

Read more

What has free trade ever done for us?

by

The answer is a lot.  A couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran a piece on globalization by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Paul L.E. Grieco, of the Institute for International Economics (Alan Greenspan is an honorary director). After a half-century of steady liberalization it is fair to ask, what do Americans have to show? … Read more

If a tree falls in a forest ….

by

Somehow, John Cole slipped off our bloglists, which I’ll correct as soon as I finish this post.  It’s particularly distressing because John has been blogging up a storm recently, and his last post on the military’s failure to meet it’s recruitment goals is a must read.  Bottom line:  the latest recruitment figures look terrible.  Fortunately, … Read more

More Things We Throw Away

by

by hilzoy

I love my country. I love it first because it is my country, just as I love my family because they are my family. And while some things might make me decide to just give up on either my family or my country, it takes a lot more than it would to make me give up on some other family or country, just because they are mine.

But I also love it for the noble experiment I take it to be. We have never completely lived up to our ideals. We enslaved people, slaughtered the indigenous peoples of North America, and so on. But we also always had a set of ideals that we tried to live up to, however imperfectly, and these shine through even the darkest parts of our history, and let us see it as a still unfinished attempt to be something truly great.

I take those ideals to be: that we are a nation of laws; that we are entitled to freely choose our own government, and that that government is legitimate only in virtue of our consent; that our government should leave us free to debate political and social questions and decide them for ourselves, rather than trying to constrain debate, and that it should leave us free to choose our own faith, rather than trying to impose one on us; that we should trust one another, and our government should trust us, to act like responsible adults who can be counted on to choose responsibly, on the whole, even if Rush Limbaugh and Ward Churchill and people like them are allowed to try to convince us of idiotic things; and that the ‘we’ I speak of should encompass all competent adults, not just members of some privileged group. In other words, liberty and equality under the rule of law.

This is a glorious set of ideals, and I love my country for trying to incarnate them, especially since, when our Constitution was written, people were not at all confident that any such government could succeed. (I have spent a lot of time reading Enlightenment moral and political philosophy; democracies and republics were generally thought to require both a small territory and the cultivation of an extreme, unnatural Spartan form of civic virtue. In this context, the creation of the USA was an enormous leap of faith based on some really radical revisions of Locke and Montesquieu, revisions I don’t think either thinker would have endorsed.) It was a crazy, inspired, wonderful idea to try to build a Republic on the ideals I just mentioned, and the astonishing thing is that our founders not only had this idea, but managed to write a Constitution capable of making it work, and then lived by that Constitution consistently enough that it stood the test of time. (Think of other revolutions carried out in the name of noble ideals — France being the obvious example — and how they turned out.) As I think I said in some previous thread, I regard this as a sort of miracle.

For those of us who are American citizens, this is our inheritance. We have been born into an astonishing country, with astonishing values. And it is our job, as citizens, to help keep alive in whatever small way we can, because, like any inheritance, it can be squandered. And the only thing that will keep it intact is if we, who have been lucky enough to inherit it, try to keep faith with those who bequeathed it to us, and do our best to preserve and enhance it for those who come after us.

Read more

Amnesty Travesty Part III: Should conservatives beat ’em by joining ’em?

by

by Charles

This will be my last word on Amnesty International, unless the leaders of this organizational throw out another rhetorical Molotov cocktail like that "gulag of our times" nonsense.  I’ll be touching on several issues that struck chords, and I believe it’s worthwhile to finish off with an appeal to conservatives to change this organization from within.

Read more

The Patent Reform Act of 2005

by

[A few updates below.]

Congressman Lamar Smith of (R-Texas) has just introduced the Patent Reform Act of 2005.  It is the most significant change to the U.S. patent laws since the 1952 Patent Act, and it will have a major impact on how patents are examined, issued, and enforced.  Because patent law is a very much inside-baseball game, however, I fear that a lot of the nuances in the debate will be lost on the general public.  My goal on this blog is to de-mystify the debate as much as possible, and to give our readership my best view on what patent reform means in a practical sense.

Here are the broad outlines of the proposed reform: 

  • Grant patent rights based on a "first-to-file" rule, rather than the current "first-to-invent" rule.
    • What it means:  The U.S. is, at present, the only (?*) nation in the world to award patents to the first person to "invent" a patent’s claimed invention, rather than the first person to file a patent application. 
    • Why there’s a move to change:  The U.S.’s first to invent rule is enormously complex, generates substantial litigation and complexity, and is out of step with the rest of the world.  Determining who is the first to invent a particular matter is extraordinarily difficult, and the applicable rules are Byzantine even by the standards of patent law. A first-to-file rule — based on what application gets to the Patent Office first — is simpler, cleaner, and much more efficient.  Moreover, a first-to-file rule will be accompanied by a change in the definition of "prior art," in order to protect an inventor who is beaten to the Patent Office.  [UPDATE:  On reflection, that last sentence is a misleading oversimplification.  A change to the "first to file" rule will indeed require a change in the definition of "prior art," but the safe harbor that I describe also requires a change in the concept of "intervening rights" (whether or not expressed in such term).]
    • Who are the winners?  The system, the Courts, the Patent Office — a first-to-file is much cheaper, easier, and simpler.  The fast (read:  the folks who have the money to patent early and often). Multinationals:  No more bizarre US-only rules.
    • Who are the losers?  The little guy, who doesn’t have the resources to file a lot of patent applications. 
    • What’s likely to surprise you?  The debate is going to be contentious, and it probably won’t break down along party lines:  Pro-business Democrats and Republicans (full disclosure:  this includes me) will be on one side of the aisle; Democrats and Republicans who favor the little guy will be on the other.  The last time this change was debated (in 1999), it caused Phyllis Schafly to lose her few remaining senses.  (How else to describe a screed that begins "All the bad deals made by the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, unfortunately, did not die with him in his tragic plane crash"?).  Oh, and the first-to-file rule might be unConstitutional.

    What else?  Read on below the fold.

    • Read more

    The Things We Throw Away

    by

    Anne Applebaum remembers what Amnesty International used to be, and laments what it has become:  I don’t know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders’ views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty’s recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few … Read more

    Grandstanding Freak of the Week

    by

    Texas Governor Rick Perry is one ignorant s.o.b. I’d call him a "sack of sh*t," but I wouldn’t want to insult manure. Not only does Perry sign new anti-abortion legislation in the school gymnasium of at the Calvary Christian Academy, not only did his office send out an e-mail to religious groups before the signing, … Read more

    Rossi Election Contest Over

    by

    by Charles Yesterday, Judge John Bridges made his ruling, upholding the November 2004 election for Washington State governor.  In a nutshell, Bridges set a high bar for overturning an election (too high in my opinion) and the Republicans fell short, the standard being "clear and convincing evidence" that the plaintiff had more total votes.  He … Read more

    We’re at War

    by

    By Edward

    I feel like such a fool. I mean, here there’s been a war raging and I didn’t truly realize it. Oh, I heard the folks insisting we’re at war, practically pleading with me to understand what’s at stake and why we must unite in the fight, but I chose to ignore the signs, preferring my haze of denial to the harsh light of hard choices. Clearly now, though, it’s impossible to deny what’s undeniable: we are at war.

    What makes it all the worse, is that all through the 2004 presidential campaign, we were repeatedly told we’re at war. One candidate stood above the rest, going to great lengths to try and rally all sides across the nation around the cause, just to be scoffed at by his critics. That candidate, of course, was John Edwards, and the war that’s raging is a class war of epic proportions. The joke is, not only are the middle classes enabling the superwealthy to shock and awe the hell out of them, even the merely wealthy are voting against their own interests, and in doing so ensuring a new oligarchy rises to untouchable heights unimagined in any other time in the life of the American Dream:

    Read more

    Department of Huh?

    by

    by hilzoy Via Brad DeLong comes an LA Times story that is, as Brad says, bizarre. “Iraqis, who are already dealing with food shortages, daily power blackouts and a deadly insurgency, on Sunday received another dose of bad news: Their newly elected leaders may slash budgets and government jobs. Many fear that the move could … Read more

    Supreme Court Rules On Medical Marijuana

    by

    by hilzoy The Supreme Court has just issued its ruling in Ashcroft v. Raich, a medical marijuana case. The ruling was 6-3; the majority opinion (by Stevens) is here; the main dissent is here. Basically, the Court argued that Congress does have the right, under the Commerce clause, to regulate marijuana, and that the fact … Read more

    When Stories Collide

    by

    by hilzoy John Bolton, meet the Downing Street memo. From the AP: “John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved. … Read more

    Watergate: For The Record

    by

    I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Watergate recently, but I have encountered a few people who have tried to argue that Nixon didn’t do anything that LBJ and Kennedy hadn’t done before him. Some, I think, were not old enough at the time to recall, and have just heard, vaguely, that he … Read more

    Moderate Conservative

    by

    by Charles When I first started writing at Tacitus, one of the first things I did for the benefit of the readers was to let them know where I was on the political spectrum (the link disappeared when Trevino switched over to Scoop).  When I was graciously invited to Obsidian Wings (and by the way, … Read more

    Paul “Veg-O-Matic” Krugman

    by

    by Charles

    Daniel Okrent started this tempest in his fare thee well column in the New York Times, with this sentence:

    Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.

    Okrent must have known the response he would get from this sentence, and he was brave for doing so.  Not surprisingly, Dr. Krugman responded forcefully in the Times’ public editor web journal:

    Mr. Okrent has so far offered only one example that, if true, would have justified his all-out attack on my ethics.

    Krugman initially responded to the only example he thought was "significant", then later responded to Okrent’s specific example [sentence updated].  Leaving aside the notion that one sentence in a column with thirteen separate numbered topics constitutes an "all-out attack", Krugman does have a history of fitting his data to his politics.  The liberal economics professor may consider the other criticisms a picking of the nits, but when you’re a columnist in the most prominent newspaper in the country, those nits aren’t so small. The fellas at QandO have been on a roll lately, and Jon Henke demonstrates how Krugman has sliced and diced in the "significant" example.  Dale Franks hit Krugman on stagflation, and Henke provides a coup de grace in this detailed follow-up.  Tom Maguire writes about his walk down memory lane with Krugman.  Andrew Samwick adds a few observations, concluding with this:

    Any time spent reading Krugman in search of an informed, liberal economist’s point of view is time that could be better spent reading Brad DeLong’s blog.

    Read more

    We Do Have a Problem

    by

    My post on the treatment of prisoners/detainees is up at Redstate, and I put it there instead of here because my primary audience is conservatives, a breed that is a distinct minority here.  I welcome and challenge y’all to go over and converse with the other side.  Or stay here and comment away.

    Are Homophobes Born or Made? Open Thread

    by

    It’s a popular meme among gay marriage proponents, the idea that because the strongest opponents of giving marriage rights to America’s gay and lesbian citizens are those in the 65 years old and over category, all we have to do is wait until they pass away (charming, I know). In fact, California Democrat Assemblyman Mark … Read more

    Look, Ma, I Broke The Army! (Part 2)

    by

    by hilzoy About eight months ago, I wrote a post about the army and reserve’s recruiting problems. I wrote then: “One of the interesting things about being involved with the Clark campaign was getting to talk to the various military people who were involved. The ones I met were generally retired career officers, mostly quite … Read more

    When Is It Right to Remove a President from Office?

    by

    Oddly, it would seem that’s not a rhetorical question. I mean, according to the Constitution, The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. That seems pretty straightforward: the president should be removed … Read more

    Why Are Conservatives People Afraid of Books?

    by

    UPDATE: Slartibartfast, who I have a great deal of respect for, was offended by this column (apparently missing the smiley face at the end of it). I don’t think it’s appropriate to edit the text, but I will concede, as others have pointed out, that liberals have been known to call for books to be … Read more

    Amnesty Take 1,783: In Which I Am Puzzled.

    by

    by hilzoy My initial reaction to the Amnesty report flap was: OK, so Amnesty’s use of the word “gulag” was unfortunate and over the top. So what? This does not mean that Amnesty has “lost its moral compass” or anything; it just means that, like most organizations, AI’s word choice is not infallible. The really … Read more

    Mystery Solved.

    by

    by hilzoy Von earlier wondered why Democrats were refusing to allow a vote on John Bolton’s nomination. I thought that was fairly clear: the White House was refusing to provide information that had been requested by Democrats and Republicans alike in the course of their confirmation hearings, and I think that the fact that the … Read more

    Dick and AI

    by

    Can you stomach a bit more on the AI report? No? You’ll want to skip this one then. In what is undoubtedly an "enter at your own risk" sort of post (seriously, not work friendly at all), The Rude Pundit (h/t wilfred) demolishes Larry King’s "interview" of Vice-President Dick Cheney. Among the safer comments to … Read more